Why the Crusades skipped Al-Andalus: economics and politics

Why the Crusades ignored Al-Andalus: economics mattered more than faith

While Christendom mobilized armies to liberate Jerusalem, the Muslim kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula had lived under Sarracinic rule for centuries without a great European crusade coming to expel them. The paradox is explained less by religiosity and more by strategic calculation and profitability.

The Crusades to the Holy Land were not a selfless pious gesture. The goal was to recover trade routes with the East, a far more lucrative business than intervening in the peninsula. There, the Nasrid kingdom of Granada paid Castile a substantial annual tribute, which made it more profitable to keep it as a tributary state than to conquer it. As an analysis of the subject noted, the Reconquista took so long precisely because sometimes collecting tribute was more profitable than fighting.

Moreover, the Spanish kings distrusted foreign aid. The ultramontane crusaders —fanatics, according to the memory of the time— carried out massacres such as the one at Barbastro (1064) and usually abandoned the strongholds they took because they could not hold them. The ephemeral conquests of the Balearics (1113-1116) and Almería (1147-1157) showed that foreign intervention created more problems than solutions. The only notable exception was the conquest of Lisbon in 1147, where English and Flemish crusaders cooperated with the Portuguese king.

At bottom, the absence of a great crusade in Spain reflects a mix of economic and political pragmatism. The Pope would hardly have managed to rally the faithful to reconquer a village in Castile's hinterland with the same enthusiasm as Jerusalem. And the peninsular Christian kingdoms, however slowly, achieved their goal without ceding sovereignty to foreign powers. Two centuries later, it would be Philip III who, in 1609, expelled some 300,000 Moriscos —a forced migratory epilogue that the military Reconquista had not completed.